2007, project in process.

Let it shine was developed during a residency in Istanbul and constitutes different chapters of work dealing with the way that ordinary meteorological reports constitute the subversive language of politics and political ideology.

Weather forecasts in Cyprus did not just tell the weather, I now noted. They expressed positions on the Cyprus Problem. ‘The Flag’, the Turkish Cypriot TV channel, broadcast a daily news bulletin in Greek for the enlightenment of Greek Cypriots. During the weather forecast, they gave temperatures only in towns in the north, where no Greek Cypriots lived. The towns were called by their Turkish names. On the Greek Cypriot side, RIK, the state TV station, used a map of Cyprus without a dividing line, but only mentioned the temperatures in the south. Other Greek Cypriot channels, right-wing private ones, regarded this as unpatriotic. They also showed temperatures in the north to make the point that those areas too belonged to Greek Cypriots. Maps in Cyprus, as elsewhere, were a political instrument. I remembered the map of Greece – not of Cyprus – at school. In order for Cyprus to appear in the map of Greece, it was cut and placed in a box next to Crete. I only became aware of this when I first saw Turkish Cypriot maps. Geography, politically speaking, sided with the Turkish Cypriots. No need to cut and paste to include Cyprus in the map of Turkey. Greek Cypriot maps showing Cyprus in the world at large always extended westwards, positioning Cyprus in a European context. They never showed Cyprus in the Middle East or Africa. The problem with the ‘Cyprus in Europe’ maps was that bits of Africa, the Middle East, and – sadly – Turkey were visible. One such map by the Greek Cypriot Public Information Office presented such undesirable bits as blank. The biggest challenge was to make a map of Cyprus that included Greece but not Turkey. The map shown as background during the news on The Word, the Church channel, managed best, with Turkey obscured by mist, as if the weather conditions had rendered it invisible. There were, however, special cases when Cyprus was shown in an exclusively eastern context. A shop in Lefkosia, for example, sensationally advertised itself as ‘The Largest Darts Shop in the Middle East’. Turkish Cypriot political parties employed different maps of Cyprus during election campaigns. The left-wing CTP, which favoured reunification, used a map of the whole of Cyprus with no line dividing it in green – neither blue nor red. The right-wing pro-division UBP showed only the northern part of Cyprus – in red of course – with the south having completely vanished. The standard official practice on both sides was to show Cyprus whole in outline but with the other side blank. Despite the political advantages that the map offered to Turkish Cypriots, they still tried to improve their lot. A map in their history schoolbook showed lines extending from Cyprus to indicate distances. The line joining it to the south coast of Turkey, the nearest possible point, was just a few kilometres. The line joining it to Greece went hundreds of kilometres, to Athens, not to the nearest Greek island. If maps were on the side of Turkish Cypriots, earthquakes were politically on the side of Greek Cypriots, unlike dwarf elephants. A Turkish Cypriot book dealing with the last thirty years explained how Cyprus had thousands of years ago been a physical extension of Anatolia, later separated by an earthquake. (I remembered my friend Erkin in Turkey telling me that when he was a child he thought that it was Greek Cypriots who really cut Cyprus off from Turkey.) The mountain range of Girne was geologically speaking still an extension of the Toros mountains in Turkey. The book further stated that the millennia-old skeletons of dwarf elephants had been found both in Cyprus and in Anatolia. Greek Cypriots, of course, did not take this signing down. A Greek Cypriot newspaper carried an almost triumphant article explaining how the fates of Cyprus and Greece were joined by a common seismic fault line.

Weather Forecasts, Dwarf Elephants and the Cyprus Problem, Yiannis Papadakis (from the book "Echoes from the dead zone")

Chapters: To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause, Lai Da Tuma, Let it shine (The Archive), Family, It really was no miracle..., Judy Garland: A Biography.